An ultrasound system has become an important and popular diagnostic tool since it has a wide range of applications. Specifically, due to its non-invasive and non-destructive nature, the ultrasound system has been extensively used in the medical profession. Modern high-performance ultrasound systems and techniques are commonly used to produce two or three-dimensional diagnostic images of internal features of an object (e.g., human organs).
The ultrasound system may transmit ultrasound signals to a target object and receive echo signals reflected from the target object. The ultrasound system may form volume data based on the received echo signals, and then perform rendering upon the volume data to thereby form a 3-dimensional ultrasound image. The 3-dimensional ultrasound image may be indicative of clinical information such as spatial information, anatomical information, etc. of the target object, which may not be visualized in a 2-dimensional ultrasound image.
Generally, rendering a 3-dimensional image may be carried out by using volume data obtained from a target object. Such rendering technique is referred to as volume rendering and may be implemented by synthesizing reflection coefficients of data at all sampling points on a ray casted into the volume data in addition to data corresponding to the surface of a region of interest in the target object.